So, more than 19 months after four Americans –including our ambassador– died at the hands of al Qaeda allies in an attack on our consulate in Benghazi, part of the truth finally comes out: the White House political operation used the story of a video to protect President Obama reelection, sacrificing the truth, our national security interests, and any shred of decency owed the victims’ surviving families on the altar of his political needs.

Newly-released documents reveal direct White House involvement in steering the public narrative about the September 11, 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, toward that of a spontaneous protest that never happened.

One of the operative documents, which the government had withheld from Congress and reporters for a year and a half, is an internal September 14, 2012 email to White House press officials from Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s Assistant and Deputy National Security Advisor. (Disclosure: Ben Rhodes is the brother of David Rhodes, the President of CBS News, where I was employed until March.)

In the email, Ben Rhodes lists as a “goal” the White House desire “To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure or policy.”

The email is entitled, “RE: PREP CALL with Susan, Saturday at 4:00 pm ET” and refers to White House involvement in preparing then-U.S.Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice for her upcoming appearance on Sunday television network political talk shows.

The Rhodes email states that another “goal” is “To reinforce the President and Administration’s strength and steadiness in dealing with difficult challenges.”

Remember, Obama had been claiming for months that al Qaeda was “on the run,” nearly beaten. It was one of his justifications for reelection: he had crushed our mortal enemy. Then they attacked our consulate and killed our personnel, and suddenly the whole narrative was about to fall like the house of cards it was.

This wasn’t a meeting of a group meant to deal with a foreign policy crisis. No, Rhodes was heading up a political damage control team. That’s where the priority was. Not in determining how this happened, not in pursuing our enemies, and certainly not in our Head of State and Commander in Chief taking responsibility, because that might have meant handing a cudgel to the Republicans. Jim Geraghty weighs in (emphasis added):

Yes, Rhodes’s speechwriting always focused in the foreign-policy realm. He was a longtime assistant to Lee Hamilton, then joined Obama as a speechwriter in 2007. But this guy’s not an expert on Libya. There’s no way he was in any position, from Washington, to overrule the assessment of the folks on the ground. He’s a message guy. And he quickly concluded – accurately – that the administration’s obvious ill-prepared presence in Libya, and failure to organize timely rescue efforts, on the 9/11 anniversary represented a serious threat to the president’s reelection. They needed a scapegoat; the video was the best option at hand.

That included, by the way, trampling the First Amendment rights of the video maker, who was hauled off in the middle of the night and pilloried in the press to play that scapegoat.

And before anyone says things were still unclear and they really thought the attack was a spontaneous reaction to the video, check the dates. Rhodes’ email was dated the 14th; the attack happened on the 11th. By the night of the attack, within hours, they knew that it was a terrorist strike, not an out of control riot against a video:

Minutes after the American consulate in Benghazi came under assault on Sept. 11, 2012, the nation’s top civilian and uniformed defense officials — headed for a previously scheduled Oval Office session with President Obama — were informed that the event was a “terrorist attack,” declassified documents show. The new evidence raises the question of why the top military men, one of whom was a member of the president’s Cabinet, allowed him and other senior Obama administration officials to press a false narrative of the Benghazi attacks for two weeks afterward.

Gen. Carter Ham, who at the time was head of AFRICOM, the Defense Department combatant command with jurisdiction over Libya, told the House in classified testimony last year that it was him who broke the news about the unfolding situation in Benghazi to then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The tense briefing — in which it was already known that U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens had been targeted and had gone missing — occurred just before the two senior officials departed the Pentagon for their session with the commander in chief.

According to declassified testimony obtained by Fox News, Ham — who was working out of his Pentagon office on the afternoon of Sept. 11 — said he learned about the assault on the consulate compound within 15 minutes of its commencement, at 9:42 p.m. Libya time, through a call he received from the AFRICOM Command Center.

But now we have the testimony of the general in charge of the combat command responsible for Benghazi that he, the Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff regarded this as a terrorist attack — within minutes of the attack beginning! Panetta and Dempsey then went to a previously scheduled meeting with Obama at which, we’re supposed to believe, they didn’t give their boss their considered opinion? They just let him believe the massacre happened because of some video few ever saw? That they let him and his advisers go on for weeks like this, when they knew the truth?

Garbage. It is inconceivable that Obama did not know that night that our consulate had come under terrorist attack.

And that was three days before Rhodes’ email, which can only mean this was a deliberate attempt to lie to the American people in order to save Obama’s (and Hillary’s) craven political rear ends.

PS: And this only answers one major question about the Benghazi massacre. Still left begging is the question of just where Obama was that night and what was his role, if he even had one. The question of Hillary’s accountability for her incompetence leading up to the disaster is a whole other matter.

No, I’m not one of those who believe Obama stole the 2012 election. He won that fair and square through superb organization. (And a pathetic GOTV effort by the Romney campaign.)

But there are persistent reports of voter fraud: people voting twice, “dead people” voting, non-citizens voting, et cetera. Mention these concerns, dare to suggest that voter rolls be cleaned up and identification be required to vote, and you get dismissed by the Left and the media (but I repeat myself) as some sort of paranoid crank, or even a racist. (As we all know, requiring IDs in order to vote must be a form of racism.) Voter fraud, they assure us, is vanishingly rare.

And yet it keeps showing up. This time, as John Fund describes, in the perennial nail-biter state of Ohio. Nineteen voters in Hamilton county, including poll worker Melowese Richardson, a (you’ll be shocked to learn) Democrat:

According to county documents, Richardson’s absentee ballot was accepted on Nov. 1, 2012 along with her signature. On Nov. 11, she told an official she also voted at a precinct because she was afraid her absentee ballot would not be counted in time.

“There’s absolutely no intent on my part to commit voter fraud,” said Richardson. . . .

The board’s documents also state that Richardson was allegedly disruptive and hid things from other poll workers on Election Day after another female worker reported she was intimidated by Richardson. . . .

During the investigation it was also discovered that her granddaughter, India Richardson, who was a first time voter in the 2012 election, cast two ballots in November.

So, she was just concerned that her vote get counted. An innocent mistake. But then there’s this:

Richardson insists she has done nothing wrong and promises to contest the charges: “I’ll fight it for Mr. Obama and for Mr. Obama’s right to sit as president of the United States.”

Why do I get the feeling poll worker Richardson might have been more concerned that Obama win a state that was expected to be tight, than she was for the integrity of the electoral system?

I must be racist.

Like I said, I don’t think fraud swung the presidential race. But I do think it had the possibility corrupting state and local races. Recall that former Congressman Allen West lost his reelection bid, in which he was a prime Democrat target, under very suspicious circumstances. (Recently the election integrity advocacy group True the Vote filed suit against the St. Lucie county elections supervisor over the “oddities” in the West election. Discovery should be very interesting.)

There’s no question our election system has problems and, given the number of times Democrats are caught stuffing the ballot box (1), it shouldn’t be a surprise that they resist any real efforts to fix it.

Footnote:
(1) As Fund has sometimes pointed out, electoral corruption by Republicans usually takes the form of voter intimidation. Democrats more often engage in ballot-box fraud.

UPDATE: Former DoJ attorney J. Christian Adams writes about the Ohio case, citing the possible federal law violations and comparing it to another infamous example of Democratic voter fraud:

This is the same sort of behavior which occurred in Noxubee County Mississippi in the case of United States v. Ike Brown that I discuss in detail in my book Injustice – double voting, poll worker collusion, absentee fraud, false voting at the polls. Her double voting sounds like Carrie Kate Windham’s behavior in Mississippi. Windham was a Democrat Party official that cast votes illegally for other people. In that case, many in the Justice Department didn’t want to do anything about it either. They were willing to give Brown a pass because of who he was and who the victims were. Meanwhile, the sanctity of our elections corrode.

(A friend of mine in Vienna is of a rare breed: a limited-government conservative living in the heart of the EU social democracy. Several of us were writing back and forth today about the election, and someone suggested her letter was worth making into a guest-post. I agreed, and she kindly gave her consent. Take it away, Wienerblut! (1) –Phineas.)

I think, what we are seeing is Americas slight transition to a political system like the EU. You might deny it but IMO this is whats happening.

The democrats did the same thing what they are doing here in Europe: they know that they don’t get votes from the working people so they create their own voters. Voters that are dependent on the government. In Europe these are retired people, immigrants, people living from social wellfare and people directly or indirectly employed by the government or pseudo governmental institutions (universities getting tax money etc.). Then you have the media, the artists and the gay groups that usually vote left.

The rest of the people are useless as voters for the leftist politicians as they would not vote for them. They are used to be charged with taxes.

In Vienna we already have more than 20 % muslim immigrants, people who came into the country within the last 20 years. Almost 90 % of them are voting for the ruling socialist party. As more and more original citizens are not using their right to vote, exactly these votes are essential for the leftists to stay in power.

The interesting thing is that most European parties, regardless how they call themselves, are leftist. No matter what they claim to be (christian democrats, conservatives etc.) they have a socialist agenda, some more than others. The parties that do not play by this rules are usually stigmatized as extremists, fascists, nazis or similar.

And now look at the States and what’s happening: IMO Obama won because of people dependent on the government. People love to hear that things will be getting better and they don’t have to do anything for it to get better.

Both the US and the EU have nearly no producing industry anymore. The large corporations are all producing somewhere in Asia. But an economy cannot live alone from the tertiary sector (services industry). In the EU its even worse as we also have a publicly subsidized agricultural sector.

So where will this lead our countries in the future? I have no idea. But sometimes I have the impression that the western world already had its peak and is declining. What do you think.

Phineas, again: I’ll agree that the wellspring of Western Civilization, Europe, is in decline. There the sclerosis of bureaucratic authoritarianism and social democracy is well-advanced, and it’s combined with severely declining birthrates that are putting tremendous pressure on the social safety nets. While America has entered into a difficult period for various reasons, we’re not there… yet. But the danger does exist. It was my hope that voters here would look at Greece, Italy, and Spain, realize we’re on that same road, and do something about it now. They chose not to, and so I fear things will get much worse before they get any better, and the correctives, when they come, will be much more painful.

As for the leftist parties in the EU creating dependent voters, they and the Democrats think alike. May I suggest they move to Europe? I’ll be happy to agree to one last round of “quantitative easing” to pay for the tickets. “Wienerblut” is welcome here, anytime. And opposition being stigmatized as “fascist,” “racist, &c.? Yeah, I hear ya, pal.

Footnote:
(1) Obviously a pseudonym. Honesty can get you in trouble in the Old Country, worse even than here. Oh, and Mr. President? She speaks German, not “Austrian.”

Roger Kimball of PJM (who, like me, has egg all over his face from predicting a big win for Romney) heard from an English friend after the election and shared this excerpt from the email:

You just don’t care about being a Great Power any longer. That’s what this is about. The world should start sucking up to China instead now, as Americans have shown they’ve no appetite for world leadership any longer. You’ve had a century in the sun, and now you’ve decided to become Sweden instead of shouldering the burden. The 47% have won and you’re going to slip into social democracy and in 4 years time no-one — Christie, Rubio, Ryan — will be able to do anything about it.

RIP American Exceptionalism

Perhaps I’ll feel better in a few days/weeks/months, but, right now, I fear this nameless Englishman is all too right.

What happened? A political narcissistic sociopath leveraged fear and ignorance with a campaign marked by mendacity and malice rather than a mandate for resurgence and reform. Instead of using his high office to articulate a vision for our future, Obama used it as a vehicle for character assassination, replete with unrelenting and destructive distortion, derision, and division.